Yankees Busy Dodging Spies, Frenchman Says (July 13, 1927)

by Jay AllenJul 13, 1927

Yankees Busy Dod ging Spies, Frenchman Says

Avers Virtue Rampant Is

Defeating itself.

BY JAY ALLEN.

IChicugo Tribune Press Service.j

FJ-A.US, July 12.-Americans are forced by their to be either con, or poachers in way or another, and the statue of liberty is a colossal joke, J. Ht. Rosny, the elder, a noted French novelist and member of the Goncourt academy, to- day asserted on his return from America.

Prohibition and the whole body of moral legislation Is unprecedented in human history and shocked him to the core, the old French writer said.

"Tlue Allericans abolished slavery for the blacks sixty years ago, but it they continue as they are headed, they will create veritable social slavery for the whites," he said. " As it is, a man s nody cannot be said really to belong to him in America now.

It is forbidden for a man to be alone in a hotel room with a woman who is not his wife, sister or mother. A simple kiss in the Park Is a legal offense. Adultery is actually considered a crime. But that does not keep the Americans from yielding to nature s demands, with the result that there exists a general state of dissimulation and hypocrisy that is rotting the soul of America.

In the United States an individual who revolts against the laws he con. siders unjust and abominable must pass a life of deceit, surrounded by all kinds of enemies and spies izi the service of virtue, who are poisoning the moral atmosphere of the nation.

`The struggle between the wets and the drys is brutal beyond words. It Is the women who give the drys their ridiculous strength. 'Not caught, not guilty.' say the poachers. That is life in AmeriCa. By the millions they live as poachers and in an atmosphere infected with puritanism, professional spies and amateur in' .

"At tte end of the nineteenth cen- tury the Angle-Saxon countries were the most liberal in the world. The wind has turned, the English are less free and the Americans are enslaved.

"The Yankee once was so lovely-a civilization so active, so ingenious and rich that it seemed that the ideals of the world s great dream- ers were all fulfilled."